Rat Finks, Beatniks and the Big Daddy

Roth was a pioneering figure in one of California's most colourful sub cultures. He was also the man who inspired Tom Wolfe's new journalism story The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.

Roth was one of three men - with Von Dutch and Robert Williams - who, in the late-1950s, created an alternative aesthetic using chopped or rebuilt production cars with additions such as enormous fins and wheels and painted in bright colours incorporating pop-art designs. In Roth's case, there were also portraits of an exaggerated rodent, the Rat Fink (pictured).

This was a hideous, salivating creature with vicious teeth, bulging bloodshot eyes and surrounded by a cloud of flies. Roth was consciously taking aim at the saccharine world of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, and Rat Fink's portrayal on T-shirts and posters became a commercial success for a brief period in the 1960s.

Scholars of the period's alternative art regard Roth's smart-arse rat as a precursor of modern cartoon characters such as Bart Simpson, Ren and Stimpy, and the jeering, foul-mouthed humour of the South Park kids.

Millions of Roth model cars were sold, for which he received one cent royalty each, and a corporate publicist gave their 1.93-metre tall inventor the nickname Big Daddy, which he loved.

He first became known in 1958 with a car he called Beatnik Bandit, followed a year later by a hot rod, the Outlaw. Both used fibreglass, a material that caught Roth's attention when he saw a Ford commercial in the late-1940s showing a fibreglass vehicle withstanding a sledgehammer blow.

Although his cars could look racy or outrageous, they were often impractical.

Later, Roth began to associate with the sometimes violent Hell's Angles motorcycle gang, and turned to customising their Harley-Davidson bikes. His new friends alarmed the company that sold his model cars and, in 1967, it cancelled his contract.

Roth was born to German-Lutheran parents in Beverly Hills. He acquired his first car, a 1933 Ford coupe, at the age of 14 and his tinkering with its engine helped him enter a Los Angeles college, which he took an engineering degree.

He served in the US Air Force after World War II and by the early 1950s was experimenting with fibreglass.

Roth used most of his money to launch a magazine called Choppers, but other magazines refused its advertisements. It failed, and by 1970 he was forced to sell his collection of 15 customised vehicles for only $US5,000 ($9,560). He went through a divorce and turned to the Mormon religion.

Later, he married his fourth wife, Ilene, a Mormon, and lived with her, her four children by a previous marriage, and his five sons from his first marriage in the intensely religious Mormon village of Manti, Utah.

During most of the 1970s and '80s, Roth distanced himself from the car culture and worked as a graphic designer for the bland theme park Knott's Berry Farm.

He still designed a few of his garish custom-built cars and was creating one in his workshop when he died.

- Christopher Reed, The Guardian

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The size of your tyre is located on the sidewall of your tyre.It will be similar to the sample below.